The Modern Independent

The Story Behind ‘Epistemic Closure’

I have been wanting to write about the ongoing debate raging in the blogosphere regarding the idea of epistemic closure and the intellectual health of not only the political right, but the left as well.  To my surprise, The New York Times actually outlined the basic contours of the debate pretty well yesterday. Rather than reinventing the wheel, here is what the Times had to say:

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase “epistemic closure” has been ricocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.

Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck— have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.” (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy, like the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States or that the health care bill proposed establishing “death panels.”

Soon conservatives across the board jumped into the debate. Jim Manzi, a contributing editor at National Review, wrote that Mr. Levin’s best seller, “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” (Threshold Editions) was “awful,” and called the section on global warming a case for “willful ignorance,” and “an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.” Megan McArdle, an editor at The Atlantic, conceded that “conservatives are often voluntarily putting themselves in the same cocoon.”

Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s administrations, wrote that in the last few years, “epistemic closure” had become much worse among “the intelligentsia of the conservative movement.” He later added that the cream of the conservative research institutes, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, had gone from presenting informed policy analyses to pumping out propaganda….

To some degree, the debate over “epistemic closure” reflects the kind of discomfort intellectuals always have with popularizers….

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, argued at frumforum.com on Friday that the problem was not media celebrities, but rather conservative intellectuals.

“They’re the ones who are supposed to uphold intellectual standards, to sift actual facts from what you call ‘pretend information,’ ” he wrote, quoting a friend. “Rush Limbaugh isn’t any worse than he was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, conservatism offered something more than Rush Limbaugh. Since then, the conservative elite has collapsed. Blame them, not talk radio.”

Last month Mr. Frum himself provoked an uproar when he wrote in a column titled “Waterloo,” after Congress passed the health care bill, “We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.” To conservative and Republican loyalists, Mr. Frum is a Neville Chamberlain-type appeaser who is willing to accept a kind of liberalism lite. After his column appeared, Mr. Frum said, he was fired by the American Enterprise Institute.

Julian Sanchez, whose blog post on the subject started the whole debate, offered a rebuttal to the copious words written on the subject over the last couple of weeks. His blog post rebuttal is well worth reading in its entirety, but, in short, Sanchez notes that the reason this debate has elicited such a broad reaction is because it identifies a phenomenon that many people already recognized and found to be a problem.

He also clarified his understanding of epistemic closure by observing that the way he originally conceptualized the term was significantly narrower than how many construed it.  He writes:

the particular phenomenon I had in mind was rather narrower than the full range of issues people have been discussing under that rubric. What I had meant to describe specifically was the construction of a full-blown alternative media ecosystem, which has been become more self-sufficient and self-contained as it’s become more interconnected. There is, I argued, reason to think that more consciously conservative news outlets could serve as a valuable counterweight to a professional class of journalists who largely self-identify as liberals. But in practice, I believe, it has instead become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for  red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately….

My use of the term was focused on the way the conservative mediasphere is increasingly able to resist incursions from the “MSM” narrative and picture of reality. Sometimes this results in a skewed perception of the importance of a story—the obsession with ACORN or the idea that the “Climategate” e-mails were some kind of game changer in the larger AGW debate. At its worst, it manifests as a willingness to hold and circulate factually false beliefs that a simple search ought to explode.

This is a crucially important debate, and though it is being waged largely on the right currently, the left should be equally reticent of the potential for its own closing of the mind. Indeed, as English Philosopher Bertrand Russell once reminded us, “the essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: Instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.“

About Ryan Dawkins

graduated Summa Cum Laude with bachelor degrees in Political Science and History, and a masters degree in American History.